“I told Zach we are putting him on a hug diet — one to say hello and one to say goodbye,” said Joyce Downing, who helped start a new program at the University of Central Missouri that serves students with disabilities.

The hope is that polishing up on social skills, like cutting back on the hugs, living in residence halls and going to classes with non-disabled classmates will help students like Neff be more independent and get better jobs.

In years past, college life was largely off-limits for students with such disabilities, but that’s no longer the case. Students with Down syndrome, autism and other conditions that can result in intellectual disabilities are leaving high school more academically prepared than ever and ready for the next step: college.

Eight years ago, disability advocates were able to find only four programs on university campuses that allowed students with intellectual disabilities to experience college life with extra help from mentors and tutors. As of last year, there were more than 250 spread across more than three dozen states and two Canadian provinces, said Debra Hart, head of Think College at the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which provides services to people with disabilities.

That growth is partly because of an increasing demand for higher education for these students and there are new federal funds for such programs.

The federal rules that took effect this fall allow students with intellectual disabilities to receive grants and work-study money. Because details on the rules are still being worked out, the earliest students could have the money is next year. Hart and others expect the funds to prompt the creation of even more programs.

“There is a whole generation of young people who have grown up under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and to them it (college) is the logical next step,” Hart said.

The college programs for these students vary. Generally the aim is to support the students as they take regular classes with non-disabled students. Professors sometimes are advised to modify the integrated classes by doing things like shifting away from a format that relies entirely on lectures and adding more projects in which students can work in groups.

One program in Idaho offers classes in drama, art and sign language. Students on other campuses can improve their computer skills or take child development classes.

Sometimes they’re paired with non-disabled students and advocates say the educational coaches, mentors and tutors who help them often are studying to become special education teachers or social workers and learn from the experience too.

Disability advocates say only a small percentage of these students will receive degrees, but that the programs help them get better jobs.

Historically, adults with intellectual disabilities have been restricted primarily to jobs in fast food restaurants, cleaning or in so-called “sheltered workshops,” where they work alongside other disabled people and often earn below-minimum wages, said Madeleine Will, vice president of the National Down Syndrome Society.

With additional training, Hart said participants can go on to do everything from being a librarian’s assistants to data-entry work in an office.

Much remains to be learned about what type of program works best, but Hart said that will likely change.

Besides allowing for federal financial aid for these programs, Congress also has appropriated $10.56 million to develop 27 model projects to identify successful approaches.

The infusion of federal money has generated some criticism. Conservative commentator Charlotte Allen said it’s a waste to spend federal tax dollars on the programs and insisted that calling them college dilutes the meaning of college.

“It’s a kind of fantasy,” said Allen, a contributing editor for Minding the Campus, a publication of the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute. “It may make intellectually disabled people feel better, but is that what college is supposed to be all about?”

Oftentimes students with these disabilities stop their formal education when they finish high school, which is usually around the age of 21. Some districts have a partnership with colleges under which the district pays for their 18- to 21-year-old students to take higher education classes. In other cases, college costs are paid for by the parents.

Their children previously haven’t been eligible for grants and work study money because they generally weren’t seeking a degree and wouldn’t have been admitted to college through the typical process.

These programs look “at higher education for what it’s purpose in our community and our culture is — to provide opportunities for learning,” said Meg Grigal, a researcher who works with Hart.

Back at the University of Central Missouri, Neff and another participant in the program for students with developmental issues, Gabe Savage, laugh with friends during lunch in their residence hall cafeteria.

Savage, a 26-year-old from Kansas City, is grateful for it all — new friends, the chance to try out for a school play, brush up on his computer skills and even take a bowling class with non-disabled students looking to earn a physical education credit.

“It’s an answer to my prayer that I am here,” he said. “I always wanted to do this.”

More youths with mental disabilities going to college

With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.

The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.

“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”

Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.

“New buildings are nice, but when they’re run by the same people who’ve given us a 50% dropout rate, they’re a big waste of taxpayer money,” said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. “Parents aren’t fooled.”

At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.

Partly by circumstance and partly by design, the Los Angeles Unified School District has emerged as the mogul of Taj Mahals.

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other L.A. schools among the nation’s costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation’s second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest performing.

Los Angeles is not alone, however, in building big. Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts — New York City has a $235 million campus; New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January.

Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks. The extravagance has led some to wonder where the line should be drawn and whether more money should be spent on teachers.

“Architects and builders love this stuff, but there’s a little bit of a lack of discipline here,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of 21st Century School Fund in Washington, D.C., which promotes urban school construction.

Some experts say it’s not all flourish and that children learn better in more pleasant surroundings.

Many schools incorporate large windows to let in natural light and install energy-saving equipment, spending more upfront for reduced bills later. Cafeterias are getting fancier, seeking to retain students who venture off campus. Wireless Internet and other high-tech installations have become standard.

Some pricey projects have had political fallout.

After a firestorm over the $197.5 million Newton North High School in Massachusetts, Mayor David Cohen chose not to seek re-election and state Treasurer Timothy Cahill reined in school construction spending.

Now to get state funds for a new school, districts must choose among three designs costing $49 million to $64 million. “We had to bring some sense to this process,” Cahill said.

In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget.

Still, even LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines derided some of the extravagance, noting that donations should have been sought to fund the RFK project’s talking benches commemorating the site’s history.

Connie Rice, member of the district’s School Bond Oversight Committee, noted the megaschools are only three of 131 that the district is building to alleviate overcrowding. RFK “is an amazing facility,” she said. “Is it a lot of money? Yes. We didn’t like it, but they got it done.”

Construction costs at LA Unified are the second-highest in the nation — something the district blames on skyrocketing material and land prices, rigorous seismic codes and unionized labor.

James Sohn, the district’s chief facilities executive, said the megaschools were built when global raw material shortages caused costs to skyrocket to an average of $600 per square foot in 2006 and 2007 — triple the price from 2002. Costs have since eased to $350 per square foot.

On top of that, each project had its own cost drivers.

After buildings were demolished at the site of the 2,400-student Roybal school, contaminated soil, a methane gas field and an earthquake fault were discovered. A gas mitigation system cost $17 million.

Over 20 years, the project grew to encompass a dance studio with cushioned maple floors, a modern kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven, a 10-acre park and teacher planning rooms between classrooms.

The 1,700-student arts school was designed as a landmark, with a stainless steel, postmodernistic tower encircled by a rollercoaster-like swirl, while the RFK site involved 15 years of litigation with historic preservationists and Donald Trump, who wanted to build the world’s tallest building there. The wrangling cost $9 million.

Methane mitigation cost $33 million and the district paid another $15 million preserving historic features, including a wall of the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub and turning the Paul Williams-designed coffee shop into a faculty lounge.

Sohn said LA Unified has reached the end of its Taj Mahal building spree. “These are definitely the exceptions,” he said. “We don’t anticipate schools costing hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.”

L.A. unveils $578M school, costliest in USA

The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up

Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? And are these digital tethers healthy for college students and their parents?

That’s the question posed by The iConnected Parent, a thoughtful and accessible guide that examines a new reality in which going off to college no longer means a weekly phone call home on Sunday night. Thanks to technology, many parents and children are in constant, daily communication. (The authors, Middlebury professor Barbara Hofer and journalist Abigail Sullivan Moore, provide compelling statistics to back up their point.)

They also offer sensible guidelines about how to navigate this unprecedented access to your child’s life in college. They point out why certain behaviors — providing a last-minute edit on a term paper, intervening with a dean because your child says her roommate is mean — can damage your college kid’s ability to solve problems without you, a key element in becoming an adult.

Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It

Don’t read this book the night before you drive the little darling to that pricey private college, because you might cancel the trip.

Queens College sociology professor Andrew Hacker, author of the best-selling Two Nations, and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus take no prisoners in their blistering attack on American colleges and universities, particularly the Ivy League.

They compare the $420 billion per year higher education business to American health care, saying it’s a bloated bureaucracy that costs an astronomical amount of money yet fails to achieve its core mission: teaching undergraduates to think, to question, to be inspired.

Their claim: This failure is going on at the nation’s 4,352 colleges and universities, from the biggest sports powerhouse to the most elite private enclave. Money doesn’t solve the problem. The authors argue provocatively that Ivy League students are among the least well-served in terms of teaching, despite parents writing those $37,000 tuition checks.

Star professors have never had much interest in teaching undergrads, leaving it to overworked, underpaid grad students. But with that price tag? Ouch.

The authors propose dramatic solutions: abolish tenure, stop paid sabbaticals, spin off medical schools. Most of all, they want parents, students, politicians, professors and taxpayers to ask themselves, what is the purpose of college? A real education isn’t about job training or establishing a “Best and the Brightest” elite.

Because Higher Education? wrestles with all sorts of big-picture, philosophical questions, it’s a thought-provoking book. Perhaps a touch too intense for parents writing tuition checks.

Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents

At age 21, Zac Bissonnette, an AOL finance blogger and University of Massachusetts senior, delivers a real mule kick to the higher educational status quo with his impassioned Debt-Free U. In an admiring foreword, Andrew Tobias gets it right when he says the author is “Doogie Howser meets the boys from Facebook.”

Mincing no words, Bissonnette argues that students and their parents must stop taking out loans to pay for college. In 2006-2007, he points out, the average student graduated owing almost $23,000 (with some owing as much as $120,000), while strapped parents took out home-equity loans. This debt will hurt parents approaching retirement and handicap kids entering adulthood.

The author writes out of his own experience of growing up with financially improvident parents. (His father’s house is in foreclosure, and his mother lives with her mother.)

His advice is old school. Consider community college. Live at home. Save money. Get a part-time job.

And parents who want to help? Get a second job.

The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) By Harlan Cohen Sourcebooks, 618 pp., $14.99, paperback original

Taking a cue from the ever-popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting series, Harlan Cohen uses a similar perky approach in his user-friendly The Happiest Kid on Campus. The funny part, despite the “happiest kid” title, is Cohen gently reminding parents and kids that most college students probably won’t be happy at first. Most freshmen are painfully homesick their first semester, and often longer. Not to mention anxious, stressed-out, confused and lonely.

But he has a lot of sensible ways to get to happy, if not happiest.

Cohen, author of The Naked Roommate, offers advice on how parents should handle move-in day (remember, it’s the kid’s room, not yours), how much digital communication is too much (the roommate she-devil of yesterday’s text might be the BFF of tomorrow, so don’t intervene), and warns against contacting professors about a failed quiz.

Some of his tips are stunningly sensible. If your child is shy, encourage him to get a job in the cafeteria or library so he has to leave his room and talk to people. The funniest advice? Mom, no cougar-ing, and Dad, quit leering.

Books offer updated advice on navigating college

States are slashing nearly $350 million from their pre-K programs by next year and more cuts are likely on the horizon once federal stimulus money dries up, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. The reductions mean fewer slots for children, teacher layoffs and even fewer services for needy families who can’t afford high-quality private preschool programs.

One state —Arizona— has proposed eliminating its 5,500-child program entirely. Illinois cut $32 million from last fiscal year’s pre-k budget and plans to slash another $48 million this year.

“The overall impact is less access to a quality education in the early years at a time when parents have reduced capability to purchase that on their own,” said Steve Barnett, co-director of the Rutgers institute. “Families are getting hit from both sides.”

Wealthier parents can afford to send their kids to private preschools, but children from poorer families will likely languish in lower-quality childcare that doesn’t prepare them for kindergarten, experts said.

On a recent morning at Walden Early Childhood Center in Atlanta, a pre-K class worked on shape and color identification by making flowers out of glue and construction paper. Afterward, the 4-year-olds broke into stations where they put on puppet shows, read books by themselves and played at a basin filled with water and toys.

“It is important to really give kids that foundation before they go to school,” said Michael Morrier, project director for the center’s grant with the state. “It really closes the gap between the middle class kids and the lower-income kids.”

Thirty-eight states had pre-k programs serving more than 1.2 million 3- and 4-year-olds as of last year, the latest data available.

Barnett said just four states had made cuts by last year, but that number jumped to 14 this year and likely will be another 14 next year. The cuts come at a time when the demand for quality prekindergarten is at an all-time high as states struggle to improve test scores in early grades and give more students a better chance of getting a high school diploma.

In Washington state, for example, lawmakers passed a bill that would expand the state’s pre-k program for needy children from 8,000 to more than 45,000 by 2018. At the same time, the legislature cut $1.6 million from the program last fiscal year and $10.4 million this year.

Arizona voters will decide in November whether to eliminate the state’s fledgling First Things First prekindergarten program — created by voters in 2006 and paid for with tobacco tax money — and use the money to balance the state’s bleeding budget.

Ohio cut its $23 million program to $11 million last fiscal year, which ended June 30, meaning 12,000 poor children no longer had access to prekindergarten. Massachusetts cut $9 million last fiscal year, and New York cut more than $36 million.

For Georgia’s program — among the largest in the country — a $9 million budget cut this year meant eliminating half of the 500 workers who help the poorest families navigate speech therapy, kindergarten applications and dental appointments so that the number of classrooms could grow from 82,000 to 84,000 children.

Marci Young, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Pre-K Now program, said prekindergarten is the key to helping the Obama administration achieve one of its main goals — improving persistently failing schools.

“When you’re thinking about turning around low performing schools or making sure you’re helping close the achievement gap … you’ve got to start in the early years,” said Young.

She pointed to studies that show states see a $7 return for every $1 they invest in early education because children who attend prekindergarten are more likely to not need remedial education, to graduate from high school, to go to college and to have higher-paying jobs that produce more taxes.

The key, said Jacqueline Jones with the U.S. Department of Education‘s early learning office, is making states believe that pre-k is part of the education package rather than something they do only during flush times.

“If you see preschool as a warm and fuzzy thing you do for children or as baby-sitting, then it’s easy to cut,” she said. “But if we can meet the educational needs before kindergarten, we can save a tremendous amount of money in special education and remediation.”

States cut preschool from budgets

Education Department officials provided The Associated Press with a list of the finalists ahead of a speech by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Duncan was expected to officially announce the finalists at a speech at the National Press Club.

The competition rewards ambitious reforms aimed at improving struggling schools and closing the achievement gap. Applications were screened by a panel of peer reviewers, and finalists will travel to Washington in coming weeks to present their proposals.

In all, 35 states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the application. The 19 finalists have asked for $6.2 billion, though only $3.4 billion is available.

Dozens of states passed new education policies to make themselves more attractive to the judges.

New York, which was a finalist in the first round but did not win money, lifted its cap on the number of charter schools that can open annually from 200 to 460. Colorado passed laws that would pay teachers based on student performance and can strip tenure from low performing instructors.

Two states, Tennessee and Delaware, were awarded a total of $600 million in the first round.

Their applications were praised for merit pay policies that link teacher pay to student performance and for garnering the support of teachers’ unions. Tennessee and Delaware also have laws that are welcoming to charter schools.

In the first round of the race, some stakeholders were reluctant to support applications tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Armario reported from Miami. AP Writer Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.

18 states, D.C. named Race to the Top education grant finalists

The $10,259 national average — $6,914 less than New York — was a 6.1% increase over 2006-07, the Census Bureau said. New York’s spending went up 7.4% over the two years. New York’s per-student spending was highest in 2006-07 too at $15,981 per student, and the national average was $9,666.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia spent more than $10,259 and 32 spent less in the 2007-08 school year. States and state equivalents that came close to New York’s spending per student in 2007-08 were New Jersey ($16,491), Alaska ($14,630), the District of Columbia ($14,594), Vermont ($14,300) and Connecticut ($13,848), the Census Bureau found. At the other end of the spectrum were Utah ($5,765), Idaho ($6,931), Arizona ($7,608), Oklahoma ($7,685) and Tennessee ($7,739).

Public education is the single largest category of all state and local government expenditures, Lisa Blumerman, chief of the Census Bureau’s Governments Division, said in a statement.

In New York, lawmakers and Gov. David Paterson have been considering placing a cap on how much school-district expenses can increase each year as a way of providing property-tax relief to strapped homeowners. The amount of property taxes that went to New York education in 2007-08 was $14.8 billion, compared to $14.1 billion in 2006-07, the Census Bureau said.

Paterson and lawmakers are also fighting over how much aid to provide to schools. Members of the Assembly and Senate said they plan to pass a joint budget that restores $600 million of the governor’s proposed $1.4 billion school-aid cut. The governor’s revised budget proposal would restore $300 million of the $1.4 billion cut.

Public schools nationally spent $593.2 billion in 2007-08, a 6% jump over the previous year, the census report said.

Total funding that public-school systems received in 2008 was $582.1 billion, 4.5% more than in 2006-07. State governments’ portion of that totaled 48.3% and local governments contributed 43.7%. The remaining 8.1% came from federal sources, the report said.

In New York, state government’s portion was 45.4% in 2007-08, and local governments contributed 48.7% of the total, with 5.9% from federal sources. The spread in 2006-07 was 45.2% from the state, 48.4% from local governments and 6.5% from federal sources.

Outstanding debt at the end of the 2006-07 fiscal year was $28.7 billion in New York, and it increased to $29.5 billion the following year, census statistics show. The amount of revenue New York received from the federal government dropped from one year to the next — from $3.3 billion to $3.1 billion.

The report was compiled based on data from all 15,569 public-school districts around the U.S.

Other highlights in the 2007-08 report:

• School districts’ debt totaled $377.4 billion, a 7.9% increase.

• The largest single category of spending was for instructional salaries, which were $203.5 billion, 40.2% of the total.

• Louisiana had the highest percentage of public-school funding from the federal government at 16.8%, followed by Mississippi (16%) and South Dakota (15.2%). The lowest percentages were in New Jersey (3.9%), Connecticut (4.2%) and Massachusetts (5.1%).

• Vermont had the highest percentage of state-government funding at 88.5%, followed by 84.8% in Hawaii, where state government runs elementary and secondary education. States with the lowest percentages of funding from state government were Nebraska (33%), South Dakota (33.2%) and Illinois (33.8%).

• States with the highest percentage of local-government funding were Illinois (58.2%), Nebraska (57.3%) and Connecticut (57.3%). The lowest were Hawaii (3%), Vermont (5%) and Arkansas (13.4%).

• Nearly 64% of revenue for public education from local sources came from property taxes.

New York public schools top nation in per-student spending

The international student market is booming. Foreign student enrollment in the United States is at a record high of 671,616 students. Worldwide, upwards of 3 million students now study outside their home countries, an expanding pie that every country wants a piece of.

“As the pie’s increased, more countries are hosting more international students,” Robert Guttierez, senior manager for research and evaluation for the New York-based Institute of International Education, said during a session Tuesday on trends in global student mobility. “So actually the relative share, if you want to call it that, of the United States has dipped from 28 to 21% [from 2001 to 2008], though we host the largest number of international students worldwide, followed by the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia.”

Among the countries clamoring to increase their share, China hopes to play host to 300,000 international students by 2020; its current enrollment, per the Institute on International Education’s Atlas of International Student Mobility, is 195,000. Japan, too, has a target of 300,000; it’s at 123,000.

“We’ve also seen increased competition, from the U.S., from the U.K and from Canada,” Jen Nielson, manager of education for Australian Education International, said during the session. “Canada has told us that they want to overtake Australia as the third-most popular English-speaking destination. They’ve been really ramping up in certain markets. But also I think [we're facing competition] from more nontraditional competitors, like Singapore, for example, which has positioned itself in the Asia-Pacific region as a hub for attracting international students.”

International student inflows and outflows are complex. Students from different countries tend to go to different countries for different reasons. Australia’s largest source country for international students is China, and 40% of Chinese students in Australia are undergraduates, the most popular major being business. Australia’s second-largest source of international students is India, and about two-thirds of Indian students in Australia are in the vocational education sector; the most popular degree is in hospitality management.

In the United States, by contrast, Indian students are concentrated at the graduate level, in engineering, computer science, management and business programs, and they are mainly clustered geographically in five states — California, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas and New York, said Rahul Choudaha, associate development of director and innovation for World Education Services, during a session on international student mobility. India sends more foreign students to the United States than any other country, and Choudaha doesn’t expect the numbers to drop any time soon.

Although India has rapidly been building up its own higher education system — enrollment in Indian engineering programs grew from 115,000 to 653,000 between 1997 and 2007, for example — the expansion, he said, has come at the expense of quality. Much of the growth has been among poor or average-quality institutions, which he called the “laggards” (as opposed to the “achievers” and the “aspirers”). (“Maybe,” he said, laughing, during a follow-up interview, “I should be more politically correct.” He cautioned, too, that he was speaking of the quality of the institutions and not of the students they attract.)

The whole point is that, while the system is developing, there aren’t yet enough high-quality Indian institutions for high-quality students to attend. This being the case, Choudaha said, “I believe that the demand for international education will remain very high.”

In Latin America, demand for international education is very low, as is supply: “Mobility to and from Latin America is unfortunately very low, and not only is it low, it’s uneven,” said Thomas Buntru, director of international programs for the Universidad de Monterrey and president of the Mexican Association for International Education. Just 0.17% of students in Latin American universities are of foreign nationality, and just 0.87% of Latin American students study abroad. Most exchange that does happen involves the United States (65%) and Europe (21%), followed by Asia (8%), Oceania (3%) and Africa (3%).

Buntru cited a number of limiting factors, among them low academic reputations of Latin American universities (as measured, for instance, in international rankings), insufficient course offerings in foreign languages, especially English, and financial constraints, as most countries in the region have either developing or emerging economies. All that said, Buntro said he was cautiously optimistic about the potential for growth, in part because of the growing importance of Spanish as an international language.

Back in the Expo Hall, countries and colleges promoted themselves, as did a wide range of for-profit companies that have developed to support study abroad and international student recruitment and services: credential evaluators, insurance companies (Cultural Insurance Services International: “You can’t imagine what kind of trouble your students can get into”), study abroad providers, testing companies, and recruitment agencies (the use of agents in recruiting in international students to the United States is on the rise).

At the very back of the expo hall were the hometown institutions —Kansas State and Park Universities, the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Study Missouri Consortium all have booths. Of the 671,616 foreign students studying in the United States in 2008-9, 11,285 came to Missouri, and 8,668 to Kansas.

Study abroad expo has countries clamoring for mobile students

“It’s a moving landscape,” says Susan Sutton, associate vice chancellor of international affairs at Indiana University Purdue-University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and associate vice president for international affairs for the Indiana University system. “Two years ago, I would have said, categorically, IUPUI and IU, as a system, do not use agents and will not use agents. End of discussion.”

Now, she’s on a system-wide task force to evaluate the use of agents. “We don’t use them at this moment and are unlikely to do so in the next couple of years, but the door has been cracked open. Let me put it that way,” says Sutton.

What’s changed? There’s been a recession, for one thing. And college leaders that in more flush times embarked on grand plans to internationalize their campuses have been looking for cost-effective strategies for increasing and diversifying their international student enrollments. These international students are typically full-paying. But international recruiting can be an expensive proposition with little guarantee on return; this being the case, the prospect of paying an outside company a portion of a student’s tuition revenue only after he or she has matriculated has proven an attractive model.

“Colleges and universities, a lot of them, are just hungry to internationalize themselves,” says Richard W. Ferrin, president and CEO of World Education Group, an agency and education services company that recruits international students (including with agents) and forges articulation agreements between its partner U.S. colleges and foreign universities. “This is for a variety of reasons, sometimes financial – we want these full-paying international students to help with our budget flows – and even with the best of educational aims, we want a more diverse student body. We’re at a time when U.S. higher education is saying we want to internationalize for educational, financial, social, and political reasons, and most don’t have the budgets to send out representatives from their institutions to go all over the world,” says Ferrin, formerly the president of Salem International University.

Seeing the opportunity, big, well-regarded international education companies – including Hobsons and IDP Education – have stepped into the marketplace, and are developing networks of agents to recruit students for U.S. colleges.

Another change, and arguably the most significant one, is that a young nonprofit association, the American International Recruitment Council, which formed in 2008, has quickly established itself as a player and has offered a degree of quality assurance to the marketplace. With aims to regulate and professionalize the industry, AIRC certifies agencies that meet its standards. Just last week, AIRC announced the certification of 16 more agencies, bringing the total number of certified agencies to 24, operating in 35 countries. (One agency was denied certification. Per its policy, AIRC declined to disclose this agent’s identity.)

“Now there is a large group of certified agents. They have been validated, if you will, they have been vetted,” says Marguerite J. Dennis, vice president for enrollment and international programs at Suffolk University, in Massachusetts. “Now it’s up to us, those of us who are involved in international education, to determine if we want to use them.”

“I think this is a tremendous opportunity for the United States,” says Dennis. “Forget my school. Forget any individual school. We have been at a distinct disadvantage for years.”

The use of international recruiting agents is common practice for colleges in Australia and Britain, but U.S. universities have reasons they’ve resisted it. For one, federal law restricts incentive compensation when it comes to recruiting domestic students; the 1992 law emerged out of concerns that recruiters would bring in unqualified students in order to collect commissions. While there are no such legal restrictions when it comes to international student recruitment, many have been skeptical of applying different standards offshore. Beyond general questions about the wisdom of commission-based recruiting – there are fears that agents will pass along students who lack the ability to succeed or otherwise would be poor matches for the institution — there’s also a general concern that agents acting on behalf of a college could engage in abusive or unethical practices or misrepresent the institution, undermining its global brand.

“We still have lots of reservations about whether we need to do it and whether that would result in students who really should be coming to Indiana as opposed to being cajoled into it,” says Sutton, of IUPUI. “The concerns are that some agents – bad agents, let’s call them bad agents – would gouge the prospective students, and by gouging I mean overcharge them for what they’re doing and act in ways we view as unethical. There are concerns that bad agents would not understand Indiana, and would misrepresent what we are, and therefore that it could tarnish the university name.”

On the other hand, “the appeal is this: that no university can be everywhere at once,” says Jim Plunkett, executive director of admissions at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, another institution that does not currently work with agents but is considering it. “The lure of using the international agent — the right one — is that you already have an advocate for your university embedded in that country, someone who knows the culture, someone who knows the language, someone who knows the education system.”

The rise of the agent model

The ability to distinguish the good agents from the bad is the premise of a standards-setting organization like AIRC, which certifies agencies that have successfully completed a process akin to accreditation, complete with self-study and site visit. “This was the missing link,” says John Deupree, AIRC’s executive director. “Before there was no standards process or quality assurance process. In our view, the biggest barrier to the use of agents has been removed.”

AIRC’s number of member colleges climbed past 100 this month. Its members are predominantly small, tuition-dependent private colleges and regional public universities, with a few larger research universities and community colleges thrown in. The most elite colleges are not represented. Many larger, more well-known institutions, both public and private, can recruit effectively on their own. They can invest funds to send their own admissions officers to Beijing or Bangalore, and spend enough time there to build contacts with high schools and prospective students.

While not every college will use agents, “the receptivity has grown startlingly fast” – including from the corporate world, says Mitch Leventhal, AIRC’s chair and president, and vice chancellor for global affairs for the State University of New York system. “I have seen a very significant increase in interest from private companies in a variety of fields, as well as private equity firms, that are either looking for places to invest their money or looking to tap into what they see as a potentially large new industry in U.S. higher education, that is, the recruitment space.”

“I’ve been visited by at least eight companies, either in private equity or related fields, who have come specifically because they’ve observed the heating up of this market and are trying to figure out if they can serve it in some way. That’s a really significant change that’s happened in the last 12 months,” says Leventhal.

He adds: “It’s early, it’s changing quickly, and there’s opportunity. Truthfully, in five years there will probably be some major players who have established themselves, and they may not be companies that exist yet or that we even know are going to be in that spot.”

Two companies that are vying to be in that spot are IDP and Hobsons, Australian and British companies, respectively. IDP, which is AIRC-certified, has moved most quickly in building a portfolio of universities, and now has agreements to recruit students for 60 colleges in the United States – including, to take a sampling, Bellarmine University, in Kentucky; Colorado State University; Dean College, in Massachusetts; Duquesne University, in Pennsylvania; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida; Guilford College, in North Carolina; John Carroll University, in Ohio; the Johns Hopkins University Global MBA Program; Lipscomb University, in Tennessee; Lyon College, in Arkansas; Mary Baldwin College, in Virginia; Thomas College, in Maine; and the Universities of Hartford, North Dakota and San Diego.

One year into IDP’s efforts on this front, “the U.S. school perception of what we do is a lot more open-minded than I was expecting it,” says Mark Shay, the company’s regional director for the United States. “That’s been tremendously encouraging.”

Also one year in, Hobsons, which is an applicant for AIRC certification, has signed up 27 U.S. universities as partners, and, at the upcoming NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference (which begins today), it plans to start signing up the next 25 or so (Hobsons, unlike IDP, has not released its list of clients).

“We’re being cautious because we want to make sure we get this right,” says Jeremy Cooper, president of Hobsons Integrated Marketing Solutions. “We feel as though we’ve had some key successes this year. For us, it’s just about continuing the pace.” Hobsons’ ultimate goal is to build a broad-based, representative portfolio of 150 to 200 U.S. universities that its network of agents can refer students to; IDP, in five years, hopes to represent 500 U.S. colleges. The partner colleges will pay a flat fee, in IDP’s case, and a proportion of tuition, in Hobsons’ case, after the students are settled on campus (after the first add/drop date for IDP, and the final withdrawal date, for Hobsons).

The results for colleges that have contracted with these companies, in terms of increased or diversified international student enrollments, are still to be determined; stay tuned until fall 2011. Many institutions, however, have high aspirations for growth, and see the use of agents as a key component of their growth strategy.

Using agents, Leventhal would like to grow the international enrollment of the 64 SUNY campuses from the current figure, 18,164, about 3.9% of the 465,000 students enrolled, to 31,500, which, assuming current enrollment levels, would represent an increase of the proportion of foreign students to 6.8%.

The University of Mississippi, which has contracted with IDP, has goals of increasing its international enrollment, currently at 3%, to 4 to 5%, over a growing student body, says Greet Provoost, director of the office of international programs. “We’re very growth-driven,” she says. Provoost adds, however, that the growth in international enrollment is two-pronged. “Number one, yes, it is increasing the brand recognition of the university, which has a lot to do with marketing and putting out tentacles that are working on your behalf, like IDP for example. But I also see it very much as a result of an effort to do what we do internally better as well, to be able to enroll more of the students who apply and who are admitted.”

Reservations about the agent model

Ethical questions regarding the use of agents, however, are by no means settled.

“There is no question that we are seeing more corporate entanglements when it comes to recruitment of international students,” says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “We certainly have no objection in the abstract to arrangements that may involve a profit motive. Certainly the bookstore has been outsourced to profit-making companies and the cafeteria has been. But we have misgivings when it comes to what we view as a fairly core component of the university mission. I think that’s the real crux of our objection and concern, is that unlike the cafeteria, unlike the bookstore, this has to do with one of the most fundamental academic functions of the university. Outsourcing this or subjecting this to the profit motive may well be crossing a threshold we don’t want to cross.”

Nassirian cites what’s happened in Australia by way of warning. While Australia is often described as a huge success story when it comes to cross-border higher education – having increased its international enrollment from 228,119 students in 2002 to 491,565 students in 2009 – its system has been strained by the rapid growth. A recent review of the international education sector was spurred partly by collapses of shaky for-profit vocational colleges and investigated a range of complaints involving unscrupulous providers offering low-quality education programs and false and misleading information provided by education agents.

As regards to agents, a government report published in February, demonstrates the possibility for abuse when colleges are not conscientious: “During the review some [higher education] providers indicated monitoring their offshore education agents’ activities was difficult and there were suggestions the Australian Government should directly regulate the activities of their education agents. Other providers indicated a disturbing abrogation of their responsibilities, a lack of good business sense or a thorough understanding of the complexities of operating an export business…. It is most concerning to hear that some providers do not believe their education agents are accurately representing them and yet they are taking no action to either cease using such agents or ensure their education agents act in an ethical manner.”

On the one hand, says Leventhal, of AIRC, Australia, long a leader in international recruitment, may now have a lesson to learn from the United States – rather than attempt to regulate overseas recruitment agencies through legal measures, the country could turn to a voluntary system of accreditation or certification (per AIRC’s model). On the other hand, says Nassirian, of AACRAO, perhaps the United States still has lessons to learn from Australia’s growth pains: “We may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. American higher education enjoys the highest prestige in the world in terms of desirability mostly because American institutions have been so meticulous in their approach to international students.”

The other national association representing admissions professionals, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, includes a blanket prohibition in its standards of good practice against commission-based recruiting; it makes no distinction between domestic and international recruitment. This has long been the case. That said, the association’s admissions practices committee is now considering the issue, with the intention of clarifying its stance specific to the payment of commissions in international student recruiting, says David Hawkins, NACAC’s director of public policy and research. “There needs to be some clarity as to NACAC’s position one way or the other,” he says.

Marjorie S. Smith, associate dean and director of international student admission at the University of Denver, remains an interested skeptic; she still has a lot of questions about the use of agents. “This may be naivet? on my part, but I don’t see why we would pay an outside agent to find students for us overseas, when we don’t pay outside agents to find American students,” she says. “To me, there’s no mystery to recruiting international students. It’s not like these companies know how to do what we don’t. It takes a professional staff, just as it does for domestic recruitment, and just as you do for domestic recruitment, you need to know the market, you have to get to know the counselors and you have to make yourself available to students.”

Whereas, she says, “When you pay [an outside agent] to enroll a student, you lose some control and you run the risk of misrepresentation. You could get slimed.”

“I’m going to watch the growth of AIRC, and their efforts to control the potential negative aspects, and applaud for them and root for them as loudly as possible,” Smith says. “But in the meantime, we’re going to make our investment more directly through scholarships and recruitment travel and social media, and our ever increasing Web presence, and we’ll also continue to work with the dozens of agents that we do – but these are agents who work for the family and not for us.”

Much of the recent rhetoric about the use of agents, paid by the college via commission, suggests that those institutions that don’t jump on board the bandwagon will be left behind. But as several professionals point out, institutions don’t have to use agents. At American University, “it’s not our policy to do so but there’s also no need,” says Evelyn Levinson, American’s director of international admissions and chair of NAFSA’s Knowledge Community on Recruitment, Admissions and Preparation (she stresses that she is stating her personal views and is not speaking on behalf of either American or the NAFSA group). “We’re doing a great job on our own.”

“From experience, I can say that universities can do really well by using internal expertise,” adds Negar Davis, director of global relations and promotion at Pennsylvania State University, another institution that does not use agents. “They can still be successful and still attract quality students to their campus, who truly understand what they’re coming into.”

Ethical debates surround U.S. colleges’ use of international recruiters

But as she watched him struggle for years — many mornings prying him out of bed and forcing him to go to school — Williams sought an alternative to the traditional classroom. The single mother now drives about 140 miles roundtrip each day to her 12-year-old son’s charter school in Sandpoint.

“It’s killing my poor little car, but it is so worth the drive to me,” Williams said in a telephone interview. “He was not getting the education he needed.”

Williams would like a closer alternative, but Idaho allows just six new charter schools a year.

Several other states also put strict limits on the number of new charter schools. Another 11 states don’t allow charters at all, even though the federal government has created a $4.35 billion competition to encourage charters and other educational innovations.

Most states adopted only modest measures to improve charter schools as a result of the “Race to the Top” competition and no new substantive charter school laws were passed, said Jeanne Allen, president and founder of the Center for Education Reform, a school choice advocate based in Washington, D.C.

“I can’t tell you how much I wish Race to the Top would have created a firestorm,” Allen said. “The reality is, it didn’t.”

Charter schools get taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools do to map out how they’ll meet federal education benchmarks. They are arguably more popular than ever, with a record 5,000 operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia, serving more than 1.5 million children. About 300,000 children are on waiting lists.

Charter schools draw fire from teachers’ unions and other education groups, who say taxpayer money should be spent to fix traditional public education system rather than creating schools that have less oversight from state and local officials.

Alabama’s politically powerful teachers’ union helped kill a bill — introduced by Gov. Bob Riley in response to Race to the Top earlier this year — that would have allowed charter schools.

“The dollars we do have need to go into the classrooms of schools we’re operating,” said Paul Hubbert, executive director of the Alabama Education Association.

States qualify for Race to the Top money based on a scoring system that gives states with charter schools a significant advantage. Of the 500 points a state can receive, 40 are related to charter schools.

At the start of the competition, Education Secretary Arne Duncan went so far as to warn states that ban or restrict charter schools were jeopardizing their chances to win a slice of the money. But he backed off that threat, and many states, like Idaho, took that as a signal that they didn’t need to change their charter school laws.

A bill to allow more charter schools for certain groups of students — such as minorities or those with disabilities — to open each year was scuttled as the Idaho Legislature focused mostly on regular public schools, which face the worst budget year for public education in the state’s history.

The first Race to the Top grants were awarded in March to Tennessee, which received $500 million, and Delaware, which received $100 million. Both were lauded for their charter school laws among other attempts to improve education.

Tennessee expanded charter-school eligibility only in 2009. Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Massachusetts also eased or eliminated limits on charter schools in the past year.

North Carolina and New York are among states that, like Idaho, are holding tight to their caps on the specialized schools.

One state — Mississippi — let its charter school law expire last year. Mississippi lawmakers passed new legislation in late March that would allow low-performing schools to be restructured to become either charter schools or “new start” schools, both of which are designed to revamp management and increase parental involvement.

Applications for the second round of Race to the Top awards are due in June. Kentucky’s legislature is considering allowing charter schools, and Hawaii officials are considering easing charter restrictions as they vie for the federal funds.

“When you put money on the line and it’s the most difficult budget faced in years, people start listening for a variety of reasons,” said Todd Ziebarth with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Charter-school bandwagon avoided by some states